Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Policies
• Audit feature
• Warning mode policy
• APM

Application suite was installed to bring in compliance with international security standards like ISO 27001 and SAUX

Integration with other applications and easier log management via automated procedures. Also needs an easier way to be able to segregate app admin duties.

Integration of CA AC at first and then APM/ELM/PMDB was initiated in 2008 and finalized stage was in 2012 for a major telecom provider.

As I implemented the additional tools, I would rate ELM as 6/10, and PMDB 8/10.

In earlier versions like 8.5 and 12 we ran into many incompatibility problems while a lot of other problems existed with JBOSS and assigned certificates.

No. Application was stable enough after APM installation.

No. There was a 3 phase staged expansion of this application which did not need any additional planning other than installing new agents on computers and servers.

Good enough, although I would have expected a better way of dealing with cases than having to explain every time from the start when a ticket was paused or opened in relevance to another one.

7/10 - They need to leave the automated way of asking from a client all tech details from start when a ticket is opened under his account ID.

No. Telecom clients (more than 3) were not using a solution similar to this one.

Initial setup was very hard due to lack of proper phrasing and instructions in manuals. It became even harder when there was a need for transition from older versions to newer ones.

I certified by CA on installing/integrating/developing the application as an outsourcing consultant.

A client claims that they have had better management and administration along with advanced reporting capabilities to the Privacy Authorities of State.

Original cost of licenses and working labor was estimated at €500,000 - €600,000 for a 4 year period. Day to day cost is not known to me.

Need to build questionnaires to establish priorities in policies and resources which are going to be developed and applied to his company. CA has no template/questionnaire in place and this is additional custom job needed by vendor (plus additional cost in money and time)

I'm checking customer experience, how they experience our website and how they use the systems inside the company. Customer experience, outside and inside.

It performs okay.

It helps me know everything. When I know everything, like when there is a problem, I can find it very quickly. It reduces the time for solving problems in the website.

Seeing what the customer is doing on our website. This is important for us to understand that they use the website as we planned.

I would like to see intelligence, deep intelligence or deep analytics.

Great. No problem.

Everything is okay. I have no problems.

Their technical support is great.

I have always used CA APM.

Dynatrace and CA, these are the best vendors that we checked. They're at the top.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and wide use of the product. Not that the product is there in one company or two companies, but worldwide. We want the company to invest money to improve it. So I'm looking for a product that is worldwide and used widely by customers.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it does not include all the features that I mentioned above, like intelligence.

Do a significant PoC, and in the PoC including something very difficult, not something light. See if in the most cases, the product is giving you the answers, and not just for the easy ones. 

Mainly for the application performance, the Java agent, and metrics collection.

It has performed well so far. Operationally, there are occasionally bugs in the agent, so we have to patch those or get those upgraded.

We are able to easily and quickly find some of the problems with the applications and coding, and some of the performance problems. Then, we monitor a lot of the performance via the application, and learn via the dashboard about the health and performance of all the applications.

• The tracing 
• The Java metrics that it collects, and the ease of accessing these. 
• The dashboards

There is a new capability, a bootstrap agent. I am excited about that. I have used another product that did a similar dataset. That helped with the agent upgrades, which are a major problem, because you only have a handful of clusters, but you have thousands of agents.

I have not seen it in operation yet, the bootstrap agent. We will be able to download the new version. Also, the ACC, we will be able to manage the agents remotely.

The interface is getting a little old, but the functionality is a major deal to me.

When we run into so many bugs, we are not sure if it is something we are doing wrong, or if there is a bug in the product, we contact technical support, who are good. They respond pretty quickly, and are usually knowledgeable about the product and some of the problems. They are able to point us to knowledge-based article, which will allow us to try to resolve the problem.

No, not for the APM part.

I came in later after the initial setup. We have done several upgrades since the initial installation. We did the setup for a new datacenter, and that was pretty straightforward. 

They did a feature comparison with some other products, but we are already a mainframe shop with CA products.

HPE, CA, and Dynatrace were on our shortlist. We chose CA because we already had a previous licensing agreement, and then the functionalities and the capabilities.

CA APM does the best when I am looking at metrics and stuff. Some of the newer products are focused on data transaction tracing.

• CEM helps us to deliver faster responses, and manage the end users’ response and reliability.
• Introscope helps our application team proactively identify and resolve problems fast. It helps reduce application downtime and improve application development based on the real-user experience.

It helps us to meet business transactions SLA for our critical end-user applications; proactively identify the issue and helps the application team make its diagnosis before it impacts the end-user experience.

CA APM currently only supports Java- and .NET-based applications. Pega application metrics should be included in CA APM. It should also support non-Java and non-.NET applications, such as SAP, etc.

I have used it for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. It needs to be more proactive. Sometimes, it takes a long time for them to provide solutions.

We previously used IBM Tivoli and BMC products.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other vendors, e.g., HPE SiteScope, and SolarWinds WPM/TraceView.

I recommend adequate server sizing and capacity to avoid HTTP/HTTPS packet drops and performance issues.

The ability to deep dive into the root cause of any given issue has always been the most valuable feature. JAVA and .NET applications are black boxes without any sort of monitoring. Being able to determine which component is causing the issue helps to pinpoint the issue and allows the triage teams to focus on the actual component causing the issue. The feature that helps the most in the triage is the transaction trace component. The transaction trace feature allows us to look all the components that are called during a particular transaction.

When there is an outage or performance issue, the on-call teams are called to a conference line where we can triage the issue. Before APM was used, these calls would require all areas of support, which include network, server team, middleware, database and any other areas of expertise. Now, the Incident Management team has a set of APM dashboards that allow them to narrow down the issue and call the specific team(s) to the bridge call. One of the first questions that is asked now on the bridge calls is, “What does APM show?” For example, if it was a database issue, we can tell which query or stored procedure is having the issue.

One of the areas that I think needs improvement is the central management of the agents. I know that CA has started working toward this in its current releases with APM Command Center, but it still has a long way to go. One of the hardest things about the upgrades is upgrading all of the agents.

Another thing that is difficult is when you need to make a configuration change to a set of properties, it has to be done manually.

I believe all these things are on the future road map of the product, but right now they are a major hurdle for us.

I have used this product personally for over 15 years. I have used it at three different companies which include a utility company, banking institution and a healthcare insurance company. The current company that I work for has used it for over eight years, and we recently upgraded to v10.1.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

The overall stability of the product is very good. The only time I normally see issues is right after an upgrade. Sometimes a few tweaks are necessary to stabilize everything after an upgrade. It might require a small change to the EM configuration or an agent configuration change. This is normally because of a new feature that was introduced.

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have been able to add Collectors as needed to support the growing number of agents that we support. I think in comparison to some other APM users we have a pretty small footprint. We have a staging and production environment. Each environment has one MOM and seven collectors with about 400 agents.

The level of support has been like a rollercoaster ride. Early on when it was owned by Wily, the service was great, but right after the purchase by CA it when downhill. I generally try not to go to support unless I have to, but I must say over the past six months, it has improved greatly. My cases have been handled very well and escalated to higher-level engineers when necessary.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We only had three collectors with only about 120 agents. When we first starting using the tool, we only used the Introscope component. Overtime, we added the CEM and Synthetic Monitoring tool. So it got more complex over time but at each step we had the right support from CA to help us through the difficult parts.

I personally don’t deal with the pricing and licensing, so I don’t have anything to offer here.

It is a great product but not quite perfect. My advice would to be make sure you have a champion on the user side. It is a hard sell in my opinion if you don’t have someone from the application support side that will help sell the tool. It doesn’t do anyone any good if you have a monitoring tool and no one uses it.

If you have a large web firm or a group of servers, it does a great job of aggregating performance metrics into single viewable graphs or dashboards.

We're primarily using it for production-system monitoring of application errors, slowness, things like that. I identify issues for our customers.

It's a very manual process, I believe, in the current version that we're using, which is 9.5. So you have to spend a lot of time analyzing the metrics to determine what thresholds you want alerts on. For example, you want response time for an application. You have to baseline that response time and then develop your systems around those. Sometimes the baselining is more difficult because you have an expectation of a response time to be slower during some periods of times than others, and you don't want to set off false alarms. So it would be great if that process did not have to be done manually.

There's a lot of improvements that could be made. I think the newer versions that are coming out go a long way towards that. Back to the baselining thing, there's a lot of automated baselines now, and they provide differential analysis of whether or not something's going wrong as compared to how it normally should be running.

Also, it could use better views into the system, of a transaction flowing through the system.

It takes a long time to get it set up and configured in your applications and running. And out of the box, what I have found is that when you take the system, if you just drop it on your application, the overhead of the agents and the monitoring and the collection of all the data is out-of-the-box, and it's too much and will impact your application. So, what we have done, in the most recent deployment, is gone to a very scaled-back version of the application and sort of added in until we were satisfied that we were collecting the data that we needed, and balancing that with not impacting the application to the customers.

For the most part, it's been stable. It's an agent product, so there's agents out on the servers. We've found that they run in services. There has been situations where the agent will disconnect or things like that, and then we're not getting metrics until someone notices it.

I'm using it primarily for our front-end websites and our mobile-banking sites. So we're probably running 250,000 clients through the system.

Technical support is really good. I'm very happy with them.

It wasn't my decision. When I joined the company, they already had it, but they weren't using it. So, some of the applications that I was responsible for, I saw that we could leverage it and so I began using it.

We are a solutions provider. Obviously, depending on the customer, we are monitoring applications. 

We have deployed to several customers and they have all found benefit in seeing how the application is performing, what components are performing worse, and where they can improve. DevOps is definitely a big play for us. 

They are seeing that benefit to having the APM product instrumenting their applications and getting that insight before it goes to production. It is working well.

Our development cycle has definitely improved as far as the turnaround time on fixes and improvements. The solution that gets put out is definitely better because of it.

• The ability to see which component is problematic. 
• If they are meeting SLAs before it gets to production impacting customers.

I know they are working on a more dynamic agent that will be able to evaluate the application and instrument based on what it is finding. I think that is fantastic. 

Getting that agent deployment simplified would be an amazing thing. The upcoming changes for the deployment process of the agent will help a lot, in that others have gotten to that point first.

It is stable. There are enhancements that we have to make sometimes that are not necessarily easy to implement depending on the customer and the situation. For the most part, it is a definitely a solid product and every customer definitely sees the benefit in using it.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to gauge overhead of a particular customer, and that was difficult to do. I know they are making improvements to the product to help address that type of situation. However, we are still in play there. There is benefit to it, but it was just difficult to prove that it was not the agent. With any situation like this, it is not uncommon to have your development team look at monitoring as a potential roadblock. Ultimately, I think we are low overhead and providing value to the development cycle.

I think other products do have a little bit more flexibility in how large they can scale. For the most part, I think every customer I have observed has been able to work with the product. Either way, we have options to scale. It is just whether it is one cluster versus a couple of clusters, and they get what they need.

Technical support is good. They are responsive, and always willing to help you. The turnaround time just depends on the issue, which is understandable. They have always been responsive with great people.

Where I started with the company, we were seeing outages daily. No one could really track what the problem was at the time. 

Since implementing this solution and having that information, the data to work off of definitely reduced that to basically nothing. It is custom code, so it is definitely a little difficult compared to some others, but it definitely helped us. For the most part, we run constantly without any issue at this point because of APM.

The initial setup is pretty easy; nothing complex.

Not necessarily. Since then, we have evaluated others and they all have their strong suits. APM still tends to do a more thorough job where others may have simplified the deployment process. 

CA APM still has a strong place in the market.

You need to really evaluate the data that you are getting and what is important to you. Where one product may do a really good job in providing visualizations and that sort of thing, are you really getting the level of depth that you need from your product? Just take the time to evaluate the quality of the data you are getting.

I like to see the vendor who is committed to your success, primarily. That they have a solid product, which I think, for the most part, most do. Also, they understand that the need to stay with you throughout the process to make sure you are supported. I think CA has always done a good job with this.

We use APM to monitor our production, our QUAIL Java environments, and our web framework environments.

It is heavily utilized. It functions very well. We look forward to new features, because as technology grows we look to incorporate some of that newer technology in our monitoring solutions as well.

We use this for ticketing. This helps us to realize not only from the monitoring standpoint, but we make custom dashboards for our development areas so they can understand how busy traffic affects their application with traffic. They can see how traffic directly affects their application in positive or negative ways. It gives immediate feedback to know, when we have a bad day, we have to look at this area because that slows down first.

It shows us where our weakest link is.

Our ability to know how our application is performing in real-time.

Client-side JavaScript monitoring, so we can have that end-to-end from the client all the way back to our host areas.

Stability could actually be helped because it is a wrapper or an agent on our system. If we are having a bad day in production or if other resources are being utilized, then we will get get gaps in our monitoring system. It does not happen very often, but it usually happens at the worst possible time.

I do not think we have had any problems with scalability. Other than right now it is just for Java agents. It does not have much JavaScript client-side monitoring.

Our monitoring team has used them and would need to be the ones to evaluate them.

I have heard good things. We work very closely with CA. We are a very large customer, so they get back to us pretty promptly.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We have had the solution for years.

I was also not involved in the upgrade setup. I was involved in a lot of the testing of the upgrade processes to make sure that it suited the needs of not only the development departments, but also the applications they monitor.

I think it is above a lot of the other monitoring solutions that are out there.

I would give it an eight out of 10, only because I know the ins and outs of the application. I know its capabilities and strong points. I think it has room to improve. 

It could be that we have it configured in a way that is not advantageous. However, it is also upgradability to it is a project instead of a patch. If it was actually an automated process to where it just fed updates to our product that would be great. Now, we have to spin up an effort to actually upgrade the solution. I think cost of upgrading holds us back from getting to the latest and greatest, where if it was more patch level, it would be easier for us to use those newer features.

Make sure to look for interoperability and ease of upgrade. Just because they have the solution, what is it going to cost to maintain the solution, because that is the cost that is hidden down the road.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Of course, they have to be competitive on cost. Always. But now, it has actually shifted towards interoperability with other solutions. We have to have open APIs that are easily tied into so we can actually hook them up to our existing pipeline features.